The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925. By Herbert G.
Gutman. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976.

Published in 1976, Gutman’s volume, The Black Family in
Slavery and Freedom, is a study of African American culture as it
developed before and after the Civil War from the years 1750 to 1925.
Gutman states that his work is mainly in response to the controversy created
by Daniel P. Moynihan’s book The Negro Family in America: The Case for
National Action published in 1965. Moynihan, drawing on the
conventional views of African Americans at the time, claimed that slavery
was the root of “the deterioration of the Negro family” and that the state
of African American families in the mid-twentieth century was a direct
result of this lack of family structure. Gutman’s intention is to prove
Moynihan and other historians of the era wrong and that African Americans,
in fact, possessed remarkable capacities to adapt and were able to establish
strong and extensive ties to their families even while enslaved.

The book is divided into two parts. The first eight chapters
deal principally with African American familial and kin relationships prior
to emancipation. In his study, Gutman uses several different slave
communities from various regions as sources of information on African
American culture. The most prominent communities include the Good Hope
Plantation in South Carolina, the Stirling Plantation in Louisiana, the
Cedar Vale Plantation in Virginia, the Watson Plantation in Alabama, and the
Bennehan-Cameron Plantation in North Carolina. He looks at the birth
registers of each of these communities to construct lineages of the slave
population in each area. He also examines the personal accounts of African
Americans and surveys taken by the Freedman’s Bureau after the Civil War.

After looking at each of these communities in detail, Gutman
uses several chapters to look at the broader implications that his findings
have on the history of African American families. He draws on information
from all of these sources to substantiate his thesis. By comparing the
figures and stories from all of these communities, he is able to construct
theories about slave family life that could be applicable to slaves from all
regions of the South. He looks in detail at slave naming practices as
evidence of family relationships and of complex methods of keeping track of
biological and fictive kin groups. He also takes into account other
cultural phenomena including informal marriage practices, forced separation
of spouses, runaway slaves, and Southern paternalistic ideology.

The second part of The Black Slave Family deals with the
families of ex-slaves and how they and their descendants adjusted to
freedom. In these final chapters Gutman examines first-hand accounts and
census data to get an idea of the experiences of slaves after the Civil
War. In addition to how ex-slaves were abused and exploited and their
migration patterns away from the dangerous South, Gutman also points out the
lengths these newly freed people went to locate their family members.
Slavery was no doubt an intensely oppressive situation, but those enslaved
in the South managed to make choices that allowed them to maintain extensive
family networks that persisted into their freedom. As for Moynihan’s thesis
about the deteriorating African American family, single-parent households
for instance, Gutman concludes that economic status was a far likelier
source than the inability to form attachments to family.

To help illustrate his points, Gutman includes numerous tables
and charts throughout his book. He adds thorough genealogies of the slave
families at each site he studies along with copied portions of the original
birth registers to which he frequently refers. Gutman makes a
well-supported argument by using these many excellent examples. In my
opinion, he definitely succeeds in accomplishing his goals of bringing
attention to the complexity of the family life of African Americans and of
correcting inaccurate beliefs of the time.

In his 1976
study of the origins and development of Afro-American slave culture and familial
development from 1750 to 1925, Herbert Gutman seeks to uncover an accurate
paradigm of the black family’s growth in North America. Gutman, a former
professor at the City University of New York, responds to Daniel P. Moynihan,
author of the 1965 book The Negro Family in America, who saw black
unemployment in urban areas after World War II resulting from a deterioration of
the Negro family, starting with the earliest African slaves. Moynihan
and several other writers’ theories of a fatherless, disorganized black family
(xviii), Gutman stresses, misjudges the role of the Afro-American father in
black families and underestimates the adaptive abilities of blacks both before
and after emancipation.

In the
first part of the book, Gutman begins to realize that strong bonds overcame many
the obstacles to personal choice, inherent to enslavement, to exist in black
families. To further study family and kin network development, he first looks
at records from the Good Hope plantation in South Carolina. Its detailed slave
birth register lists over two hundred slave births. In addition to providing
the date of birth for each slave baby, the register also lists the name of both
parents, even though the mother’s status as slave or free determined the child’s
status. The record of the father’s name strengthens his argument that fathers
also played a role in children’s lives. Good Hope records reveals a high
percentage of lengthy slave marriages and reveals commonplace sexual practices
of slaves, such as prenuptial intercourse and childbirth before marriage.

Next, Gutman focuses
on five other plantations’ slave familial arrangements. These five plantations,
located across the South, vary in size, ownership, and crop production, all
possessed similar domestic arrangements to Good Hope’s slaves. Occurrences such
as slave parents naming their children for blood kin and the larger kin network
applying pressure to enforce slave marriage norms happened in most slave
communities. The naming of slaves for grandparents, uncles, fathers, and aunts
linked slave children to a wider kin network, the social basis for the slave
community. Surnames also served an important role in connecting slaves. Whether
adopted from a former master or forbearer, many slaves used last names to
symbolize close ties between their immediate families. These cultural norms
overcame disruptive plantation events, such as the sale of slaves to different
plantations, which further spread this common slave culture that began to
develop when the first African slaves landed on American soil.

Gutman shifts his
focus from the precise study of plantation life of slaves to the many inaccurate
perceptions, he believes, of slave behavior and the black family by contemporary
historians, such as Frazier, Elkins, and Eugene Genovese. Gutman insists that
the old models of slave behavior provided by these and other writers need
revision. He discounts Frazier’s argument that the poor treatment of slaves
fully explains slave behavior as Frazier ignores the impact of slave
socialization and relations with family and kin on slaves’ actions. Genovese’s
Roll, Jordan, Roll and Elkins’ works both emphasized owner control over
the slaves. Gutman strongly believes that blacks largely made their own ways
and feels that these earlier authors do not understand that social and cultural
processes, developed by the earliest slaves, formed into traditions that passed
down to later generations, creating an Afro-American culture.

Finally, Gutman
provides a short analysis of ex-slaves in their first years of freedom and their
descendants in the early twentieth century. Although emancipated, Gutman
recognizes that ex-slaves in their first few years of freedom continued to face
difficult challenges like Black Codes, abuse, and exploitation from whites.
Even through these problems, black marriage rates remained consistent, a
testament to the strong slave culture that developed during their time as
slaves. Looking to the 1880s and up to 1925, as many blacks migrated North in
search of better jobs and safer living conditions, Gutman’s research indicates
no actual breakdown in black familial ties and society during or after
emancipation, disproving the standard ideas and arguments found in much of the
applicable historiography up to his study.

In compiling data
for this extensive research project, Gutman accessed materials from southern and
northern rural and urban areas, households in Buffalo and New York City, and
plantations throughout the South. Combined with census figures, birth and
marriage registers, and many published books, Gutman’s sources aptly help him
disprove that black females commonly ran their households alone. This work
enlightens readers about the ability of slaves to sustain vital familial
associations and revises the ideas of several previous historians concerning
Afro-American culture. All readers should enjoy this aggressive revisionist
work, which traces the development of the black family in America and their
relationships, which served as the foundation of Afro-American communities.

In this groundbreaking work, Herbert G. Gutman responds to the
controversial work of Daniel P. Moynihan’s The Negro Family in America:
The Case for National Action (1965). Moynihan argued the troubles experienced
by African-Americans with the migration to northern cities and the problems
experienced in adapting to northern urban life was rooted in the deterioration
of the African-American family beginning with the enslavement of Africans
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He believed that distortions
existed in family life and basic family organization was not allowed to
survive; only the mother-child family could persist. Gutman responds by
examining African-American families between 1750 through 1925 and the early
development of the family structure and culture. In The Black Family
in Slavery and Freedom, Gutman addresses the African-American family
before and after general emancipation by looking at the cultural beliefs,
behaviors, and adaptive capacities of the family. As a reply to historians
who maintain that family and familial ties were not important within the
slave experience, Gutman examines several factors of the family experience.
He draws his evidence from plantation records, county census schedules,
and Freedman Bureau records.

During and after the Civil War, the last generation slaves tended
to live in long marriages and most children lived within double-headed
households. Gutman uses birth and marriage records kept by the slave owners,
focusing on the Good Hope plantation in South Carolina and the Stirling
plantation in Louisiana. Long-term marriage was not the exception, but
the norm within the slave societies studied. Marriages lasted as long as
thirty plus years. Another factor observed within this study is that of
premarital sex. There has long existed the belief that the slaves had a
particularly strong sex drive that could not be controlled. Gutman argues
against this school of thought. Prenuptial sex did exist among slave society,
but its roots can be found in Africa and other pre-modern cultures. Slave
owners also encouraged reproduction by slaves for economic purposes, but
prenuptial sex within slave society was congruent with established marriages.
There were often births before marriage or pregnant brides, but the records
Gutman studies shows that lifelong marriage between couples that experienced
this phenomenon occurred more often than not. He makes the distinction
between prenuptial sex and promiscuity, something that was not common among
slaves.

Double-headed households were dominant as opposed to the single-headed
households and this prevailed through emancipation and up until the Great
Depression. This was usually the norm on the Good Hope plantation, and
though there were more occurrences of single mothers on the Stirling plantation,
with fathers not recorded in the birth records, the double-headed household
was still the norm. The double-headed household could be found among both
the field hands and the more privileged house servants.

Naming practices among slaves was a manner in which slaves could
distinguish themselves from their masters. After the War for Independence,
many slaves took the surnames of their masters to develop a family identity,
indicating the importance of the enlarged family group, but by the nineteenth
century, slave names were patriarchal based and indicates a separation
from the masters identity over time. Slave children were commonly named
after their father, almost fifty percent of the time, or they were given
the name of an uncle or grandfather. This shows the generational ties that
exist between the slave families and the attachment to the enlarged kin
group.

The methods used in choosing a marriage partner are particularly
fascinating as they are absolutely unlike the methods used by the planter
class. Slaves held deep-seated exogamous beliefs and adhered to this practice
for many generations. Close blood marriages were considered taboo, unlike
the endogamy frequently practiced by the planter class. This practice fashioned
the way slaves chose their spouses.

Gutman also looks at the other aspects of slave life, such as
slaves who were sold off their plantations with which they held familial
ties. On the Cedar Vale plantation in Virginia, fathers sold off from their
families separated slave families, but Gutman contends that because these
fathers were sold to nearby plantations, the familial ties were still close.
In this area, he seems to gloss over the problems that could develop because
of separation of family.

All of these practices are looked at in a bigger context, spanning
a period much greater than just that after 1830. Many of the roots of these
practices were developed long before then and carry over into the post-Civil
War era. The Great Exodus of African-Americans from the South to Kansas
that took place in the 1880s consisted primarily of families. One of the
prominent reasons stated by African-Americans for this exodus was to protect
the women and girls from being harassed and worse by white males. The family
ties were still strong and of primary importance within the African-American
community.

All of the families looked at within the period of this study share
the common characteristic of being poor, second-class citizens, but this
did not contribute to household organization among African-Americans. The
African-American family did not disintegrate after emancipation or because
of the great northern migration before 1930. This completely disregards
the early twentieth century academic view of the African-American family
life as disorganized because of circumstances that existed in slavery.
By 1900, male-absent households and subfamilies increased, but the long
marriage was still common among African-American families. Gutman argues
the twentieth century migration to northern cities did not splinter the
African-American family. It was able to remain stable and functionally
successful as a familial structure within slavery, and survived the transition
to freedom and into the black, urban, northern ghetto until at least 1925.

Though this piece is sometimes difficult to follow as Gutman uses
an abundance of names to show how his research is developed, he also provides
useful charts and information for the reader to explore for further clarification.
It is an important work in the history of the African-American family as
its approach and perspective is unique from any previous work done in this
area.